


i never left you for a banjo

by throughadoor



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Government Conspiracy, Kidnapping, M/M, Teen Angst, post-episode 24
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 18:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7725004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throughadoor/pseuds/throughadoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Adam Hayes spent his summer vacation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i never left you for a banjo

**25.**

For as long as Adam could remember, his parents had scripted his summers with a heavy hand, trying to provide the optimal mix of opportunities for academic enrichment, developing a sense of personal responsibility, and loading up on ammunition for his college applications. This summer, he was signed up for Intro to Ethnomusicology at the community college, volunteering two afternoons a week stocking shelves at the food pantry on the other side of town and a part time job digitizing old radiology slides at the hospital where his parents had apparently been only pretending to work. 

Even with everything that had happened between Adam and his parents at the end of the school year, he kept plodding through the schedule they'd planned for him. The routine kept him pretty busy, and there wasn't much time to think. The whole situation was pretty fucking ironic. For the first time in his life, Adam was willing to do anything to avoid being left alone with his thoughts.  
  
  


"Yo, hey, Hayes, is that you?" 

Adam was leaning back into the car to grab his wallet. Hearing his name, he did a double-take and nearly smacked his head on the roof of the car. When he turned around, he saw a jeep two parking spots over and a guy leaning out the passenger-side window. "Yeah, Hayes," the guy said. "What's up, hang on for a sec." 

It was one of Caleb's football team guys. Adam thought his name was Dylan or maybe Devin. "Um, hey," Adam said awkwardly. He rubbed the back of his head, like there was a phantom pain there from his narrowly-avoided collision with the roof of the car. 

"What's up?" Dylan-or-maybe-Devin said. 

Adam shrugged. "Just getting coffee," he said. 

On Thursdays, Adam had class until one o'clock and then his volunteer shift at the food pantry started at one-thirty on the opposite side of town. There was only one place to get coffee on the route between campus and the food pantry. It was some crappy local chain, and their iced coffee had the dubious distinction of tasting both watery and burnt. Adam figured he'd be stopping there every Thursday this summer, because the only thing more real than the power of inertia was his caffeine addiction. 

"Good stuff," Dylan-probably-not-Devin said, and then, "Hey, do you know what's up with Michaels?" 

"Caleb?" 

"Yeah, where's he been lately?" 

"He got a summer job at a sleepaway camp up north," Adam said, offering the cover story being circulated by Caleb's parents. 

"Oh, okay, cool," probably-Dylan-but-still-possibly-Devin said. For once in his life, Adam was grateful for the emotional constipation of football players, because this guy didn't seem to think it was weird that Caleb had never mentioned he'd be gone for the entire summer. "But you talk to him and stuff, right?" let's-just-assume-it's-Dylan asked. 

Adam gulped. "Yeah, not really," he said, trying to make it sound casual and offhanded, like he'd ever been something other than intense and neurotic about anything. "The camp's all the way out in the middle of nowhere and there's no cell phone signal." Adam spared a moment of gratitude for Mr. and Mrs. Michaels, who had really put some thought into fleshing out this fake backstory. 

"Ugh, that sucks," Dylan said, making a face. "Well, if you talk to Michaels, can you tell him that the kid who plays left tackle at Hamlin ended up transferring after all, so our offensive line is going to kick so much ass this year." 

Adam blinked a couple times, but thanks to Caleb he couldn't even pretend like he hadn't understood most of that. "Yeah, sure thing," Adam said. 

"Alright, thanks dude," Dylan said, sliding back down into the passenger seat. Half a second later, he stuck his head back out the window. "Hey, wait," Dylan said. "You and Michaels didn't, like, breakup or anything, right?" 

Adam's mouth opened but no words came out. His first thought was that if he were a character in a web comic, there'd be a speech bubble above his head that was just an ellipsis. "Uh, no?" he eventually managed to stammer out. 

"Oh, okay, good," Dylan said. "Because that would have been hella awkward, if I'd just been all like, 'Hey, can you give your ex-boyfriend a message for me?'" 

Once again, the only response Adam could manage was the equivalent of a speech bubble ellipsis. Fortunately, Dylan didn't seem to be looking for him to keep up his end of the conversation. 

"Sorry, man," Dylan said. "It must suck that he's gone all summer. Anyway, see you later, if you do talk to him, tell him I said what's up." 

Adam had absolutely no way to reach Caleb, and even if he did, he still wasn't sure that this guy's name was Dylan and not Devin. Not to mention that Caleb probably knew the guy by his last name, and Adam didn't have a clue on that one. 

"Sure thing," Adam said weakly. He wished Caleb were here right now, and that Adam could ask him why all the football players called each other by their last names and whether this was proof that football was just a thinly-disguised extension of the military industrial complex. 

"Cool," Dylan said, giving him a little wave. "See ya." He disappeared back inside the jeep. Whoever was driving backed it out of the space and toward the exit of the parking lot. Adam pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time. He still had a few minutes to grab some bad coffee.  
  
  


Technically, what Adam had said was true. They hadn't broken up. Caleb might have been on the verge of dumping him, but he'd gotten kidnapped first. 

When they had their big fight, it had started because of Adam's parents working for the AM. But then the AM had made their move anyway, from a direction no one had seen coming. 

"I know this is hard, but they said it would only be for the summer," Caleb's mother had said, standing with Adam on her front porch. "It's an inpatient program, so he won't be able to call or write, but he'll be back before the beginning of the school year." 

"But what about Dr. Bright?" Adam had asked, hating the watery sound in his voice. 

"Dr. Bright is more of an outpatient option," Mrs. Michaels had said. For whatever reason, she had been holding Caleb's favorite hoodie when she'd answered the door. Adam had recognized it by the logo of the football team mascot over the left breast. The school's mascot was a tiger, something Adam hadn't even known before he'd started hanging out with Caleb. 

"They said they could tell from her notes and his school records that Caleb needed something more intensive, at least in the short term," Mrs. Michaels had said. The longer she and Adam had stood on the porch, the tighter she'd twisted the sweatshirt between her hands, like a washcloth she was trying to wring out. Adam had been watching the tiger logo distort into a twisted blur of orange and black when he'd decided not to tell her anything he'd heard about what really happened at the AM.  
  
  


**26.**

The one change Adam had made to the summer schedule was that he'd called one of the therapists Dr. Bright had recommended. His ethnomusicology class only was only Monday through Thursday, so he'd started seeing Dr. Ramirez on Friday mornings before he had to be at the hospital. So far, it had been … complicated. 

"I'd like it if we could talk more about something you mentioned during your first session, which is that you're not living with your parents this summer." 

Okay, so, technically Adam had made two unsanctioned adjustments to his summer plans, the therapy thing and the low-key running away from home thing. 

"Um, yeah," Adam said. "I'm staying at my aunt's house. She travels a lot for work, and she needs someone to feed her cat and stuff. She used to ask her neighbor to do it, but now the cat's super ancient and he gets this special medicated food and it's a whole thing, so." 

They were sitting opposite each other in Dr. Ramirez's office. She rented space in one of those old Victorian houses that had been split up into a bunch of small offices, so there was no air conditioning, just a box fan in one of the windows that replaced the hot air inside with more hot air from outside. 

"It's nice of you to do that for her," Dr. Ramirez said. "Are you very close with your aunt?" 

"Not really," Adam said, letting his gaze drift up above Dr. Ramirez's head. He'd only been coming here for three weeks and he had already memorized all the art on the walls: some sort of macrame wall hanging type thing over by the door, a big photo print of vineyard above Dr. Ramirez's chair, and what looked like a thrift store reject painting of flowers in a vase on the wall next to the window. 

"I see," Dr. Ramirez said. "So, is there anything going on between you and your parents that would make you more likely to volunteer to spend the summer taking care of your aunt's cat?" 

Adam shrugged. "Not really, I guess," he said. "Just normal stuff." 

"Alright," Dr. Ramirez said. "Can you tell me a little more about that, though? What's normal between you and your parents?" 

It was a good question. Lately, Adam had been asking himself the same thing. 

He'd thought his parents were normal run-of-the-mill over-achieving workaholic neurosurgeons, dispensing the standard doses of disappointment disguised as concern to their depressed social outcast kid. But, it turned out that his parents were evil mad scientists who did secret experiments on people with superhuman powers and probably the only reason they were letting him live at his Aunt Annabelle's house this summer was that he'd told him he knew what they really did for work, and no way in hell did he believe that they had no idea what had happened to Caleb, and he wasn't coming home until they told him, and if they tried to make him, he'd go blabbing about their big secret jobs to anyone who would listen. 

"They work a lot," Adam said finally. "So I don't see them much anyway. This isn't really that different."  
  
  


Since the majority of Adam's current problems led back to the shadowy government conspiracy that had kidnapped his boyfriend, he spent a lot of time talking to Dr. Ramirez about his problem sleeping. She'd told him the worst thing he could do when he couldn't sleep was to lie in bed and look at his phone, and yet somehow he still found himself awake at three am, scrolling through the Wikipedia entry on Charles Bonnet syndrome. 

He closed out of Wikipedia, let his thumb hover over the Messages app and then opened Instagram instead. He regretted it immediately, because whoever was in possession of Caleb's phone had started posting pictures to make it look like he was having a normal summer. Adam wondered who was doing it. He almost made himself laugh, imagining fake Instagram posts being the sort of job the AM gave to an intern. This vaguely reminded him of some old movie where the supervillain had an intern she'd make do mundane errands, like pick up her dry cleaning and stuff, but that was the only thing he could remember about it. 

He closed out of Instagram, and was drifting back to opening up his text messages when the soft thump of his aunt's cat jumping up on the mattress distracted him. The cat walked across the bed and reached out with one paw to bat at Adam's feet where they were sticking out from under the edge of the rucked-up sheets. 

"Thanks Ollie," Adam said. "Good looking out." 

The cat watched him from the foot of the bed, eyes flashing in the reflected light of Adam's phone screen. 

"Great," Adam said. "Now I'm talking to a cat." 

He groaned, rolled over onto his stomach and opened the IMDB homepage. Maybe he could figure out what the supervillain intern movie was called.  
  
  


**32.**

The four-day-a-week class schedule of the condensed summer semester was seriously brutal, and the only person who seemed to dislike it more than Adam was his professor. On Thursday mornings, Professor Schaffer didn't even bother with preparing a lecture, she just put on an old vinyl record of something she'd collected during her fieldwork days and told the class to write down their observations. Which was how Adam found himself this morning, racking his brain to come up with something else to say about Inuit throat singing. 

Adam looked up from his paper and around the room. Times like these, he wished he could be like Caleb's friend Chloe, so he could pluck other people's thoughts out of their heads. There was a slight clatter as a pen slid off the desk next to his and rolled to a stop at his feet. He reached down to grab the pen at the same time as the girl sitting at the next desk, and which left their heads awkwardly tucked together. 

"Thanks," she whispered when he handed her the pen. 

"No problem," he said. 

"This stuff is really cool," she said, tipping her head toward the front of the room, where the record player sat on Professor Schaffer's desk. "But listening to it for three straight hours is kind of a lot, right?" 

"Maybe, yeah," Adam said. "But the whole reason this was so popular was because they needed something to do in the winter when they couldn't leave their houses for, like, three months, so I guess it could be worse, right?" 

She laughed quietly. "Good point," she said, and sat back up in her seat. 

Adam looked back at his notebook, and wrote down something about how living environment informed art and culture. He thought that might have been the longest conversation he'd had with anyone this entire week. 

The class was a mix of students from the community college who probably just needed the extra credits and older retired people who were fulfilling their lifelong dream to learn more about the didgeridoo or whatever. No real surprise, but Adam didn't fit in with either group. Which should have been fine, because that had basically been Adam's entire school experience, aged kindergarten to six months ago. But, somehow he'd gotten used to the monotony of the school day being broken up by classes with Caleb. It wasn't like they held hands under the desk or or whatever. Even before they started doing the boyfriend thing, it'd been nice to have an automatic partner for group work, and someone to snicker with every time their English teacher had leaned against the whiteboard and smeared his carefully printed homework assignment, which he'd done about once a week.  
  
  


**47.**

Somehow, another few weeks went by. He wrote a paper on the nueva canción movement, digitized every chest x-ray taken in 1995 and unpacked about a million cases of canned evaporated milk. Friday morning came, and he was back at Dr. Ramirez's office. She'd added a rotating fan opposite the window box one, which succeeded in moving around the different sources of hot air a little more quickly. 

"So," Dr. Ramirez said. "At our last session, we discussed the difficult situation with your boyfriend. He's currently at a residential treatment facility, and you believe your parents are partly responsible for sending him there." 

"Yeah, pretty much." 

"That must be very painful for you," Dr. Ramirez said, stating the obvious. "Can you tell me more about the source of conflict between you and your parents?" she asked. 

"My parents think Caleb is … sick, I guess. They think he's sick and I think some people that they work with convinced Caleb's parents that he's sick. But he's _not_. There's nothing wrong with him." 

Adam knew his voice was getting progressively louder the more he talked, but Dr. Ramirez's face held the same placid expression. "You know," she said, "just because the adults in your life believe that Caleb might benefit from some time in an inpatient program doesn't mean that it will always be like this. You might be worried that he'll need this level of treatment forever, but there's no reason to think that's necessarily the case." 

"No, I know," Adam said. He sighed. The whole 'away at an unspecified residential program' thing had been his brilliant idea last week, and it already had more plot holes than a Marvel movie. "It's not that," he said, starting again. "It's -- they think that--" 

Dr. Ramirez leaned forward with concern. "Adam," she said, "do your parents think Caleb is sick because of his sexual orientation?" 

Adam had to fight the urge to roll his eyes, because superhuman powers as a metaphor for gayness was so trite, but what the hell, it was a tired old cliche for a reason. 

"Yeah," Adam said, letting his shoulders slump in a way that hopefully made him look like he'd been caught out by Dr. Ramirez's badass therapizing. "That's what it is. They basically sent him to an ex-gay camp." 

Dr. Ramirez just nodded in response. Adam wondered if psychologists had to take a class where they learned how to keep themselves from visibly gloating when they thought they'd gotten to the root of a patient's problem. "Well, I can understand why that's very upsetting," Dr. Ramirez said. "I know you said at our first appointment that you'd never received mental health counseling before, but have your parents ever tried to pursue that type of treatment for you?" 

Adam frowned, because he really should have seen that one coming, shit, he was so stupid. "Oh, yeah, no," he said, scrambling. "Nothing like that. My parents … don't think I'm gay." He was so fucking stupid, was what he was. He totally couldn't ever come back here. 

"I see," Dr. Ramirez said. "This must be very stressful for you. Keeping this from your parents, especially knowing how they reacted in Caleb's situation, that's a substantial burden on your shoulders. Many people your age experience symptoms of depression and anxiety because they feel they can't be honest with their parents about their sexuality, it would be very normal for--" 

Adam looked past Dr. Ramirez toward the door, tracing the designs of the macrame thing in his mind's eye. "Yeah, um," he said, cutting her off mid-sentence. "Do you think we could just actually just talk about that insomnia quiz? I was hoping we could talk about that today." 

"The sleep hygiene inventory?" Dr. Ramirez said. "Of course we can talk about that, if that's what you'd like to do. Were you able to complete it?" 

Whatever else might be totally problematic and possibly evil about Adam's parents, they'd definitely always known he was gay. They'd probably identified it on a neurological scan in utero.  
  
  


**57.**

Adam's workstation for digitizing radiology slides was tucked away on a basement level of the hospital that looked like the opening scene in a zombie apocalypse movie. There was nothing down there but Adam, the music blaring from his earbuds and an endless stack of medical records from before he was born. It was the first Monday in August, and he was listening to The 1975 while he worked his way through every CT scan from February of 1997. 

The 1975's new album was a lot more dance pop than he'd expected, and kind of unavoidably full of entitled fuckboy breakup songs. They were basically his guilty pleasure band, except that he'd read a bunch of posts on Tumblr about how calling something a guilty pleasure could be a way to devalue pop culture that was primarily consumed by younger women. That made a lot of sense to him, and so he was doing his best to strike that expression from his vocabulary. 

He'd tried to explain that to Caleb, the last time they'd been listening to this album in the car. "I'm pretty sure all the words you just said were English," Caleb had said, "but when you arrange them in a sentence like that, I have no idea what you're talking about." 

Adam had rolled his eyes. "C'mon," he'd said. "There's nobody else here, you don't have to keep up the dumb jock act." 

"I really think you overestimate me," Caleb had said, smiling and shaking his head. 

They'd been at a stop light just then, so Adam had been able to turn and look at Caleb: his feet propped up on the dashboard in his big dumb ugly sneakers, his favorite hoodie sitting in his lap because it had been a cold spring and he hadn't yet shed the seasonal habit of leaving the house with a sweatshirt. For a few seconds, Adam hadn't known what to say, but he had known that Caleb was about to get drowned in an embarrassingly strong wave of the saccharine sweet fondness that Adam sometimes felt when he looked at him. 

"I really don't," Adam had said. Gambling that they still had a few more seconds at the red light, Adam had leaned over to kiss him. He'd been aiming for Caleb's cheek but the awkward angle and the armrest between them meant he'd landed closer to the corner of Caleb's eye. They'd both started laughing, and-- 

Adam shook his head, forcing his thoughts back to the present. He reached over to unlock his phone, so he could skip past this song to one that didn't make him think of Caleb. Except that his life had somehow turned into a TV drama on the CW, because every song made him think of Caleb. He scrolled through his music, looking for something he'd previously burnt out on and hadn't even thought about listening to since before he and Caleb started hanging out. He eventually settled on the Bleachers album and got back to work. 

There was only one problem: Adam was pretty sure that very loudly and pointedly thinking to himself that he was not even going to consider thumbing over and reading through his old text messages did not actually count as not thinking about doing it.  
  
  


**61.**

Dr. Bright opened the door to her office, arms crossed over her chest, looking an equal mixture of exhausted and pissed. "My secretary tells me that you're refusing to leave the waiting area," she said, "so I suppose you might as well come in." 

Once they both sat down, she continued. "I understand you're going through a very difficult time, Adam," she said, "and I think it's good you want to talk to someone about your feelings. But it's like I told you before. I am not an appropriate therapist for you, for a wide variety of reasons." 

"I know, you said that," Adam replied, "I know. And I did call one of those people you recommended, and I saw her a couple times." 

Adam paused, looking down at his own lap and his clenched hands. He hadn't let himself think about what he was doing when he'd started driving in the direction of Dr. Bright's office. He'd actually felt pretty calm, like the time he'd gotten sent to the principal for getting belligerent with his US History teacher about Ronald Reagan's role in contributing to the AIDS epidemic. It was the peace of mind that came from deciding to do something that you specifically knew was kind of reckless and not caring about the consequences. 

That calm was all gone now, though. It felt like Adam was involuntarily reabsorbing all the scared anger he'd felt the last time he'd been sitting in this room. He wondered if this was what it was like to be Caleb. 

"Here's the thing," Adam said finally. "I get that you don't see people like me because I'm not an atypical or whatever, but I'm, like, atypical adjacent, aren't I? I couldn't tell Dr. Ramirez that my boyfriend is an empath and my parents are evil government scientists who got him kidnapped, so now she thinks they're religious nutbags who got him sent to an ex-gay camp. The only thing that's getting better in therapy is my improvised lying!" 

"I understand that this is a stressful time for you--" 

"Why does everyone keep _saying_ that, like I'm studying for the SATs or--" 

"--but I am still not the appropriate therapist for you," Dr. Bright said firmly, ignoring Adam's interruption. "I can give you the name of a colleague of mine who has a mixed caseload. They see both atypical and non-atypical patients. I didn't give you their name originally because I don't think they're currently accepting new patients, but you could try to call them and see if they have a waiting list." 

As she was talking, Dr. Bright stood up and walked over to her desk, grabbing a pen and a sheet of paper. She kept talking as she quickly jotted something down, and then glanced back up at him. "Good luck, Adam," she said. Up to that point, there'd been a forced upbeat tone in her voice, but now she sounded as tired as she looked. "I really hope you find what you're looking for."  
  
  


**65.**

"--and then she hands me this!" Adam hissed, holding up a crumpled pink missed call memo. At the bottom of the slip was a short message from Dr. Bright: _It's not safe for you to be here. Don't come back. Talk to Chloe._ He pushed the paper across the table, diverting its path around a sticky patch on the tabletop. They were sitting in the back corner at Chloe's favorite smoothie place. When he'd showed up, she'd told him he looked like he was allergic to Vitamin D and had made him order something called a Spinach Sunrise. It tasted like grass clippings. 

"Oh yeah," Chloe said, examining the note. "She thinks the AM is bugging her office. You know, because of what happened with Mark." 

"Who's Mark?" 

Chloe bit her lip. "Um, long story," she said. "The point is, she says to tell you that what happened to Caleb is actually pretty normal. It's how they always did things when she was working for them, the whole outpatient model was her idea after she left. Anyway, she says to try not to worry, and there's no reason to think Caleb won't be home after eight or ten weeks." 

"But it's already been two months," Adam said, ignoring the part of his brain that chimed in to remind him it had actually been more than two months, that Caleb had been gone for exactly two month last Saturday. 

"Yikes," Chloe said. "Still, that means he'll probably be home in the next couple weeks." She tilted her head slightly. "I know, I get it," she said, responding directly to Adam's train of thought, "that's not very reassuring. But she really does think he'll be fine. She thinks the AM was probably trying to send a message to her because of what happened with Mark, and she feels really guilty about that." 

Chloe winced briefly, then added, "She didn't tell me to tell you that last part, but, you know, telepath." She shrugged. "And yeah, I get it, you still want to know who the hell Mark is," she said. "But, like I said, it's a really long story, and you're probably safer not knowing. Long story short, some stuff happened earlier this summer, she pissed off the AM and now she's worried her phone is bugged, that someone might be following her, stuff like that." 

Adam buried his face in his hands, which he decided was a totally reasonable response and much less melodramatic than banging his head against the table. "Are you kidding me?" he said. "How is this even really happening?" 

"Your boyfriend can feel it when you start lusting after him when you're sitting behind him in math class and this is the part you can't believe? This is pretty run of the mill secret government agency stuff." 

Adam looked up abruptly. "What? How did you -- did Caleb tell you about that?" 

Chloe made an exaggerated show of tapping one finger to her temple. 

"Right," Adam said. "Never mind. I'm an idiot." 

"You're not an idiot," Chloe said kindly, "you've just got a lot on your plate right now." She reached out and swapping out his smoothie cup for her own. "Drink that," she said, pointing at the cup she'd put in front of him. "It has strawberries, you'll like it. I know you think this one tastes like the inside of a lawn mower." 

Adam took a sip, and it did taste a lot better. He tipped the cup at her in a toast of appreciation. 

"But seriously, quadratic equations? Chloe said. "That's what gets you going?" 

Adam looked down at the strawberry smoothie, pretty sure his face was about to turn the same color. "Ugh, no," he said. "It's not that. It's like -- after he told me, I could tell Caleb was into me. I don't need his ability to get that. But with him, it's kind of all, um--" 

Adam paused, fumbling for what he was trying to say. "All up here, is the best way to explain it, I guess?" he said, mirroring Chloe's gesture from a minute ago and tapping one finger to his temple. "I don't know if that's because of his ability or because he's never been into a guy like that before, but I can tell it makes him embarrassed when I, like--" 

"When you're checking him out," Chloe said, waggling her eyebrows. 

"Uh, yeah," Adam said. He took a big slurp from his smoothie so he'd have an excuse to stop talking and promptly gave himself an ice cream headache. He felt like crawling under the table, that was how mortified he was to be having this conversation. 

The worst part was that they were barely scratching the surface of Adam's bottomless pit of neuroses when it came to this type of stuff. Every time he and Caleb had passed another relationship milestone, Adam had been prepared for the worst case scenario: Caleb pulling away in disgust, saying he couldn't do this, that Adam's feelings were so strong that they'd gotten Caleb confused, that he just didn't like Adam like that. No matter how hard Adam had tried to hide it, Caleb had always been able to feel Adam's anxious dread, and that had been kind of a mood killer. Honestly, it was a miracle they'd ever made it to first base. 

"So, anyway," Adam said, looking down to fidget with his straw. If Chloe had been reading his thoughts just now, he didn't want to know. "In math class, I sit two rows behind him, and I figured I could get away with a little ogling, but of course my boyfriend is an _empath_ , so." He shrugged. 

Chloe nodded. "You're right, though," she said, eyes widening. "His shoulders are very broad. He's got that blue shirt--" 

"Oh, believe me, I know," Adam interrupted swiftly, twisting the straw between his thumb and his middle finger. "Football," he said. "Who knew it was good for something after all?"  
  
  


When Adam opened his text messages, he didn't even need to scroll down the whole screen to get to the last conversation he'd had with Caleb. Directly below an auto-reminder text from his aunt's veterinarian, a back-and-forth with Chloe about their meet-up at the smoothie place and a bunch of unanswered texts from Adam's mother were the last messages he received from Caleb, even though they were over two months old. 

_I'm really sorry that I freaked out today. Your feelings usually don't affect me like that, so I didn't know how to handle it. I think Dr. Bright was pretty freaked out, too, so that didn't help._

_Sometimes when I get overwhelmed by other people's feelings, I say stupid shit that I don't mean._

_I'm not better off alone. And I think that you aren't either. I'll tell you again tomorrow and I'll keep telling you until you believe it. I'll even wear that blue shirt you like._

_Okay?_

_Okay._

Everything below that was just a series of unanswered texts from Adam to Caleb, asking where he was, why wasn't he picking up his phone, no, seriously where the fuck was he and other variations on that theme. Adam never scrolled down that far. He'd read those last four texts from Caleb so many times that he didn't even need to be looking at them on his phone, he knew the words by heart. 

Being Caleb's boyfriend hadn't miraculously cured Adam's depression, or fixed Adam's fucked-up relationship with his parents, or otherwise transformed his life into a magical place of sunshine and rainbows. But he wasn't better off alone, and neither was Caleb. Once Caleb was back -- whether that was next week or next month or after Adam completely lost his entire mind and convinced Chloe they had to mount some kind of rescue scenario -- he wouldn't even make Caleb say it once for Adam to believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> Toward the end of Season 2, it seemed like there was a possibility that the parallels between Mark and Caleb would end with Caleb getting nabbed by the AM. That didn't happen, but I couldn't get the idea out of my head. But that's why summer hiatus fic was invented, right? Thanks & credit to [smartlike](http://archiveofourown.org/users/smartlike) for describing The 1975's new record as "entitled fuckboy breakup songs." The title is Tori Amos, which is anachronistic as hell for this story but I couldn't resist an homage to the soundtrack of my own queer teenage angst.


End file.
